The spirit of late royal couturier Hardy Amies is alive and well under his brand's current design director, Mehmet Ali, writes Bill Prince

The house of Hardy Amies is just that – one of the few remaining Georgian facades on Savile Row, announced by two bold obelisks that somehow survived its bombing in the Second World War.

It was immediately after the war that Amies took up residence, transforming 14 Savile Row into a salon of some eminence, and the scene of some profound post-war fashion moments.

Amies, who died in 2003, is best remembered as the Queen’s couturier (along with Norman Hartnell) but as anyone who’s familiar with his seminal Sixties publication The ABC Of Men’s Fashion will attest, he had a brisk, witty take on this topic too.

And it’s this approach, unencumbered with hyperbole and refreshingly low on b.s., that the new owners of Hardy Amies are bringing back to its menswear. Mehmet Ali, design director, enshrines this down-to-earth ethos both in his early training (apprenticed to a former Savile Row tailor based in Kent) and his preferred style: unfussy, well-cut clothing with a relaxed feel and an inferred duty to last.

As such, Hardy Amies is a rather refreshing conundrum: a Savile Row brand (with beautiful premises to match) that doesn’t simply bark “tradition” loudly from its front door – as if that were a be-all and end-all anyway.

Hardy Amies continues to offer bespoke (cut by Stuart Lamprell) as well as a more affordable made-to-measure service, but the real story is the business Amies himself pioneered, elegant ready-to-wear with an eye on its times but forged from the sort of perennial pieces to which every man requires access.

Accordingly, Ali has shrewdly examined Amies’s own hinterland – including a wartime spell in the S.O.E. – to develop his collections, harnessed not to Savile Row’s tailoring heritage, but to the broader remit of what in Amies’s day would have been known as the “men’s outfitter”. He’s done this by focusing on some rather special outerwear pieces, including a rather brilliant reversible “bridge coat”, cut longer than the more famous pea coat, and once worn only by officers serving on the bridge of a vessel – hence its name. Jackets are necessarily shorter, as is the current trend, and – similarly – opt for a softer, less structured feel (particularly in the shoulder – fittingly a world away from the epic “roping” found elsewhere on the Row).

Embracing the more luxurious side of Amies’s Mayfair lair, Ali has also created some shimmering blue/black silk dinner jackets in what first appears to be a jacquard, but on closer examination reveals itself to be his own monogram, artfully incorporated into a pattern. It’s chic, different, and plays to a personality-type that Ali describes as “overt”/“covert” – bold, controversial even, but at the same time keeping its own counsel, as Amies once did (he rarely, if ever, spoke of his wartime service).

Perhaps closer still to the founder of the house’s heart however, would have been Ali’s determination to collaborate wherever possible with UK suppliers: a handsome brown leather bomber jacket, complete with lambswool collar – which could quite easily have come from an atelier in Paris or Florence – was made in London’s east end.

It’s an important provenance, for just as customisation is revolutionising the fortunes of those businesses that have access to one-of-a-kind manufacturing techniques, so too are the more sustainable attributes of short supply lines.

The new owners of Hardy Amies, 14 Savile Row, are thus shrewdly creating a business along clean, functional lines (meaning proper rather than merely speculative pricing) and no “sharp elbows”, sartorially speaking. Which, as the clamour increases around participants old and new partaking of the new boom in menswear, is a breath of fresh air.